Skills and understanding for building effective collective power
We are living through a crucial time for social movements. During this ‘twilight of neoliberalism’, we are seeing growing movement power and significant shifts in public narrative. At the same time, the challenges of the climate crisis, increasing inequality, the rise of the far right, need us to continue to build effective collective agency.
“Leadership is accepting responsibility for enabling others to achieve purpose in the face of uncertainty.” (Marshall Ganz)
Since the social awakening that began around 2011 in the post-crash and austerity context, we’ve seen a surge of socio-political engagement. More recently, there has been a new round of fresh mass mobilisations responding to the climate emergency, racial justice and inequality.
These surges of engagement are bringing many new actors into the field of social movement organising. At the same time, we are seeing failures to understand and work well with power dynamics (within groups, between organisations, and in the wider socio-political sphere), or to bring deeper understanding about methods for mutual empowerment and solidarity. All too often these can hinder our efforts to build effective collective agency.
Without greater skill within these new movements, their radically transformative power can be lost. Both social change and social movements are highly complex. Faced with these challenges we can also lack skills for thinking and acting in ways that bring systems intelligence and understanding of complexity.
This training explores skills and understanding needed to sustain and consolidate the potential of these new actors and mobilisations. It offers new thinking and learning for fresh approaches to leadership. On the one hand, this needs to provide a clear critique of classical models of leadership (authoritarian, top-down and often bestowed with patriarchal tendencies). On the other hand, it needs to address the pitfalls recognised in what Jo Freeman described as a “tyranny of structurelessness”, where informal power still is unequal and groups become without clear direction, accountability and even a viable strategy.
We will draw on case studies and offer a language and conceptual framework on grassroots leadership that is adapted to current social movement’s needs. We will explore ideas and practices related to:
• The idea of “group-centred leadership” (Ella Baker), which allows for leadership to be shared and accountable
• Leaderful movements instead of leaderless movements
• Leadership that enables groups to embody their values
• Models that avoid the failings of both classic hierarchies and the limitations of fetishized horizontalism
• The adaptation of learning about ‘agile’ organisational leadership to the context of socio-political work
• Leadership development as a practice to support groups to transition from mobilising to organising.
Who is it aimed at?
Anyone involved in socially engaged action addressing ecological, political and social justice issues. We embrace a broad definition of activism, including: Resistance – action preventing further damage to ecosystems and social justice; Renewal – action focused on developing and creating alternatives for healthier societies and communities; and Building Resilience – action supporting increased resilience in communities to weather the uncertain times ahead.
In the solidarity economy:
(See details of our approach to radical economics here)
Contact us
to apply
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LABO vzw is a non-profit educational organisation that strives as a movement towards a strong civil society that collectively work to create social change and a commitment to social justice. LABO vzw believes in the power of communities to facilitate radical transformation of the current model of society. A crucial condition is the sustainability and democratization of community associations that have come under pressure. LABO vzw advocates for the extension of a creative community of discerning global citizens who transform our society. The acronym LABO literally stands for “Learning, Acting, Movement and Organizing.”
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ECON is a hub for the community organizing movement and supports organizers to build an effective counterbalance to the rise of right-wing extremism, racism, and nationalism in Europe. ECON serves as a hub for the community organizing movement across Europe with a focus on developing the craft of organizing through training and mentorship, technical assistance, and by creating a space for organizers from different countries to collectively develop their strategic practice.
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Linzy Na Nakorn is a movement director, politicised somatics practitioner, community organiser and facilitator. For the past decade she has been facilitating movement, body work and creating theatre, dance and participatory performance that advocates for and organises with communities in pursuit of housing, disability and racial justice. Her movement practice focuses on trauma-informed approaches to building resilience, capacity and joy via way of the body for personal, interpersonal and community sustainability. Linzy was a Co-Director of The Big Ride for Palestine in partnership with The Gaza Sunbirds, Native Woman Ride and Middle East Children’s Alliance; using cycling as a tool for mobilising active solidarity and in support of campaigning for the rights and self-determination of the Palestinian people. Linzy is part of a UK network of activists and artists advocating for Radical Care – supporting organisations, researchers and institutions to work towards system change in societal approaches to labour, leadership and access.
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Jeroen (he/him pronouns) has been involved in grassroots social movements for more than two decades now, starting back when he was fifteen. Throughout the years the fights for “climate justice” and “migrant justice” have been consistently on top of the list of struggles that make his heart beat faster. A key transformative moment for Jeroen was reading Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Freire’s revolutionary pedagogy gave him a language to support the creation of emancipatory learning environments, rooted in a desire for collective liberation. Jeroen has also been exploring in depth Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed and Joanna Macy’s The Work That Reconnects among other methodologies to build his trainer’s toolkit. Inspired by the liberatory possibilities of these traditions, he started an organization with a friend, LABO vzw, based in Belgium, where he has worked as a trainer and campaigner between 2013 and 2023.
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Ella brings more than 10 years’ external experience working with not for profit and community based organisations across diverse themes including: advocacy for migrant communities; local community engagement in national policy making; and structural relationships between poverty and disenfranchisement, and education and poverty. Immersed in critical theory in her early 20s she brings a holistic and questioning approach, and is passionate about systemic solutions that centre relationship and interconnection between ecology and society. A long standing member of the collective, Ella has been part of the core team since the inception of the Ulex Project. Her work bridges facilitation, developing project partnerships, governance, strategy, operations, and project and programme evaluation. She has developed and overseen more than 70 partnerships with a range of different actors across European social movements.
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Alex has been facilitating courses geared towards social and personal transformation for the past 6 years. They have spent the last 10 years as a core member of the collective running the Ulex Project and has a deep experience of the integral approach we have developed. Their area of training expertise is sustainable activism and skills for developing ‘deeper resources’ for action. Their commitment to social justice and history of political activism have involved them in direct action and affinity group work focused on climate justice, anti-capitalism, queer politics and gender identity. A strong focus on the somatic dimension and embodied practice (informed by their work as a dance artist and yoga teacher) underpins both their approach.
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Nina (they/she) is a participatory artist, community organiser and political theatre maker. Theatre of the Oppressed has been a core part of their practice since they trained in India with Jana Sankriti in 2018. They are an artistic director of queer led theatre company, You Should see the Other Guy, who work on and off stage to tackle social injustice and make raucous musical verbatim plays. Nina has designed and delivered multiple TO training programmes in activist, community and academic settings, often combining TO with song making to collaboratively explore themes around power and identity. Their current fascination is thinking about TO as a practical manifestation of queer theory and asking: Is Theatre of the Oppressed queer?
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Marianne is a Holistic Security Trainer and Coach, part of the Holistic Protection Collective. She accompanies activists, human rights defenders and journalists globally. Being an activist herself, she is also a trainer for direct action and civil disobedience, and having a background as a mediator, she trains other activists how to facilitate dealing with conflicts in grassroots groups and diverse teams.
Tools for effective and sustainable activism
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new stories: different worlds
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Knowledge, skills and perspectives to challenge oppression and create spaces of solidarity.
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Tools for effective and sustainable activism
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Navigating the complex terrain of migrant and migrant-solidarity organising
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an introduction to a holistic and transformative approach to activist training and facilitation
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Go to the people, learn from them. Live with them. Love them. Start with what they know. Build with what they have – Lao Tzu
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Building facilitation capacity through participatory practices.
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a space to think critically, to ask challenging and transformative questions, and find deeper inspiration and understanding to empower social change.
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building and strengthening regenerative praxis for BIPOC organisers.
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Ulex: Latin (argelaga Catalan, gorse English) noun:
1. A thorny-evergreen flowering shrub, with a high capacity for regeneration and resilience. Its seedpods open in contact with fire and it reshoots from charred stumps. A successionary plant that grows well under challenging conditions. It improves soil fertility through nitrogen fixing, preparing the way for renewed biodiversity.
2. A traditional choice for igniting fires. Burns hot and bright.
3. A networked project adding nutrition and fertility to European social movements through training and capacity building. It kindles the realisation of social justice, ecological intelligence, and cognitive vitality.
